Writers and Books presents: A discussion of Allen Ginsberg

Kill Your Darlings

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Join Joe Flaherty, Executive Director of Writers & Books, John Roche, Professor of English at RIT, and The Little after the film to discuss Allen Ginsberg as a person and a poet. Flaherty and Roche will share their personal experiences with the eccentric poet as well as discuss his genius and his art.

Joe Flaherty is the Founder, Artistic and Executive Director of Writers & Books. He graduated from Penn State University with a BA in English Literature in and later received an M.F.A in Photography in 1974 from the SUNY Buffalo’s program at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester. In 1980 he founded Writers & Books out of the belief that reading and writing needed to be promoted as life-long activities on a year-round, ongoing basis in communities across the country. Since that time, Writers & Books has grown to become one of the largest community-based literary organizations in the entire country, with programs reaching more than 25,000 Rochester-area residents each year.

John Roche is widely interdisciplinary in his interests, with an M.A. in Anglo-Irish Literature and study of Yeats, Blake, and other bardic figures that he puts to use in teaching Irish Literature and various poetry classes, but his background is also firmly rooted in Walt Whitman and the American free-verse and experimental poetry traditions that draw on his conception of the poet's twin responsibilities to his or her own individuality and to the civic society the poet must engage. He created a class at RIT in Beat Literature. He continues to pursue his own poetry, alone and in collaboration with musicians like the Handmade Orchestra and the Chicago Scratch Orchestra.

About the Film:

Ends on Thursday Dec 5th
Daniel Radcliffe stars as Beat Generation icon Allen Ginsberg in this biopic set during the famed poet's early years at Columbia University, and centering on a murder investigation involving Ginsberg, his handsome classmate Lucien Carr, and fellow Beat author William Burroughs. The year is 1944. Ginsberg (Radcliffe) is a young student at Columbia University when he falls hopelessly under the spell of charismatic classmate Carr (Dane DeHaan). Alongside Carr, Ginsberg manages to strike up friendships with aspiring writers William Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) that would cast conformity to the wind, and serve as the foundation of the Beat movement. Meanwhile, an older outsider named David Krammerer falls deeply and madly in love with the impossibly cool Carr. Later, when Krammerer dies under mysterious circumstances, police arrest Kerouac, Burroughs, and Carr as potential suspects, paving the way for an investigation that would have a major impact on the lives of the three emerging artists. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kyra Sedgwick, David Cross, and Michael C.

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